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Saturday, September 20, 2014

A Favorite Fish

Do you have some favorite individual fish that you have caught? I sure do. I can't say I have a single favorite, but a handful of fish I've caught over the years definitely stand out from the rest.

The dolly varden pictured above is one such fish. I was reminded of it the other day when I noticed the "Yukon" folder in my old slide files. Trip was to a spectacular fly-in lodge deep in the Yukon Territory, when I got to play the guest part for an episode of at Cabela's TV show.

We'd caught numerous grayling on dry flies and 3-weights early and had abandoned that game in search of bigger fish and different footage for the show. The guides spotted a couple of big dollies in a pool and beached our rafts so we could wade for them. We grabbed 6-weights rigged with weighted fly lines and marabou streamers and chunked the big flies out into the pool.

I soon hooked a fish, but it didn't feel like much, and when it came to the surface it was an 9- or 10-inch grayling.

That was when things got interesting.

A dolly showed up out of nowhere and started slashing at the grayling. Camera guy beside me, of course, was eating it up. The grayling went down and the dolly too. When I got the grayling back to the top the dolly was still after it. Then they went down again and my load got heavier! The grayling was gone and the dolly varden was hooked. Five minutes later, the guide helped me land a big and beuatiful fish that was hooked in perfectly in the corner of the mouth.

The whole thing made for a really cool segment on the TV show and remains one of my favorite fish I've ever caught.